Chapter 48
Elias clung to the roof of a Wiscasset police car.
The cop had come along less than fifteen minutes after Alfie had swerved off the road and crashed the plow, ending his own life.
Root had crawled back up to the road and roared at the rest of them to do the same.
Elias had been the last to reach it, ground down by the constancy of their pain.
But that pain had only hinted at what would come.
Root had bent the cop to its will, climbed into the passenger seat, and curled up like a dog before a fire.
Afua and Mathieu lay across the back seat.
Elias had climbed onto the roof and stayed there as the policeman drove the last fifteen miles through the storm to reach the Shediak bridge.
Wind caked snow onto his face and hair and clothes.
Elias barely noticed when it covered his eyes.
His fingers clung to the light bubble on top of the police car, and his body curled up behind it, shriveled into a ball of pain so complete that he shut down.
Consciousness lingered, but only barely.
Until the police car slewed to a halt. A door opened.
The clanking made him open his eyes. He blinked, realized the snow had blinded him, and scraped it away.
The pain made him move slowly, almost a crawl, dragging himself to the edge of the car’s roof to investigate the sound.
The policeman stepped out of the car and rose, swaying.
Elias licked his frozen lips. He could smell the man’s warm blood.
Root crawled across the driver’s seat and spilled from the car.
It rose like a serpent from a snake charmer’s basket.
The motion seemed fluid, but Elias could feel the pain radiating from it, knew that agony in his own bones.
Every time it moved, it was like it had broken glass in its joints and needles in its muscles.
Stillness seemed the only respite, and he understood now why its kin had hibernated all those years, hiding, unmoving.
Root grabbed the policeman by his hair and smashed his head through the car window.
He sawed the man’s throat across jagged glass.
Blood sprayed and then pumped from his arteries, and from above, Elias saw Mathieu and Afua poking their heads through the broken window to receive splashes of this red communion.
Root drank from the fountain itself, and only then did it look up at Elias.
“Come,” Root murmured.
Elias did. His joints felt aflame, but he slid from the roof of the police car and dropped to his knees.
Blood painted his face, so he reached out to steady the policeman’s corpse.
Root might not have offered it, but he dug his teeth into the man’s throat, drinking straight from the source.
He tore bits of flesh and ate them. Root grabbed him by the face and shoved him away so the others could follow suit.
“Look,” Root commanded.
They could see the bridge from here, even through the snow.
Dark figures loomed in the storm near the sides of the bridge and wandered the road ahead, aimless and forlorn.
Just off the side of the road, a woman in a tattered dress lay halfway out of a hole in the ground.
She looked as if she’d tried and simply given up.
“There are too many of our people here,” Root said. “The witch’s family could not have made it across. So where are they?”
Elias ground his teeth together, fighting the pain.
He walked toward the bridge, feeling the heat of the policeman’s blood in his mouth and gullet, already beginning to cool.
One of the figures in the snow ahead lay across the bridge, pale and bloated.
Like the rest, it was racked with so much pain that it couldn’t take another step toward Shediak.
The bridge spanned perhaps eighty yards, but the water that flowed beneath it churned with the wind and the clawing strength of the tides. Elias looked to the right. He could smell the salt and hear the crash of the surf.
“The ocean is that way,” he said. “Just open water from there.”
Root and Afua had come up behind him. Mathieu trudged after them, hunched in pain.
Despite the part of Root that slithered inside him, filled him with poison and malice, the thing that called itself Elias still had the ghost of the man within.
He wanted to extinguish that spark, but for the moment, it served him.
Served them all. Because that last bit of Elias Wise knew his brother.
“He’s a clever bastard,” Elias spat. “Quick thinker. That’s how he survived Korea. If he hasn’t crossed the bridge, I promise you they’ve found another way out there.”
Root’s eyes narrowed. “Come.”
Slightly stooped, teeth bared, it started toward the bridge.
Elias wanted to collapse in the road and curl into a ball, but once Root had forced Elias to eat its flesh, it was as if Root had him on a leash.
He tugged mentally on that leash, and Elias followed.
Afua walked with them, a low whine in her throat, trembling with the pain.
Elias glanced back and saw that Mathieu had gone to his knees in the road.
The stout little monster tipped on his side and lay there beside the bloated leech that had not moved since they drove up.
Halfway across the bridge, Afua unleashed a scream of frustration and agony. She sat and leaned against the bridge. Root turned and snarled at her in wordless disgust, but it and Elias kept going. The shredding pain in his joints worsened, but Elias reached the other side of the bridge with Root.
He understood now. Freedom and frenzy and bloody abandon awaited if they could keep Maggie from being buried in Shediak, but if they failed, this pain would be the least he felt for years or centuries or eternity.
He would dig himself a hole and suffer in blind agony as if he’d been damned to the hell his teachers had always warned him about.
Elias didn’t need Root’s worming presence in his head now.
He would kill his brother and sister and tear his mother’s corpse apart and cast it into the Atlantic Ocean, because he had to if he wanted an end to this pain.
He would do it now, because he wanted that relief more than he’d ever wanted anything.
He would murder his family, and he would rejoice.
They turned and walked along the island’s shore, picking up speed, watching the water and inland for any sign. Fewer than one hundred paces later, the pain grew so strong that Elias had to scream, but he didn’t stop. Didn’t slow. Root had to hasten to keep up with him.
To the east, a thin band of horizon shifted from black to purple. He wept blood from the pain, but he quickened his pace.
The wind shifted, and a sound reached them from somewhere out over the ocean.
A voice, screaming. A voice he knew.
Maggie’s.